AWS re:Invent Recap - Amazon Lures Developers With New Tools And APIs

AWS has gone back to its roots to strengthen the API and developer tools offerings of its cloud platform. At the recently concluded re:Invent event, the company emphasized on developer productivity through new APIs, integrated tools, and a new browser-based IDE.

Unlike the previous conferences where the focus was on enterprises, this year’s re:Invent was more about developers and less of enterprises. Though the keynotes put the spotlight on enterprise adoption, the new services and tools are squarely targeted at developers.

Source: AWS

AWS Cloud9 IDE

As expected, Amazon has added powerful AI-based services which are just an API call away. Amazon Rekognition, the computer vision service, got new capabilities in the form of video analysis which can detect and recognize faces in live streams. When combined with Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, a managed video ingestion and storage service, developers can analyze video feeds in real-time.

Amazon Translate, another AI service, uses deep learning to deliver accurate and natural sounding translations. It currently supports Arabic, Simplified Chinese, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. Amazon Comprehend is based on advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to identify text, key phrases, places, people, brands or events. It understands the sentiment about products or services and identifies the main topics from a library of documents. For speech to text conversion, developers can consume Amazon Transcribe, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that can analyze audio files stored in Amazon S3 and return a text file of the transcribed speech with time stamps.

The most prominent announcement came in the form of AWS Cloud9, a cloud-based IDE for writing, running, and debugging code. Amazon relaunched Cloud9 with tighter integration with AWS services. AWS Lambda developers can use Cloud9 for developing serverless applications to define resources, debug, and switch between local and remote execution of serverless applications. AWS Cloud9 is integrated with AWS CodeStar, a service to manage end-to-end application development and deployment in the cloud. The IDE supports mainstream languages including JavaScript, PHP and Python among other languages. Cloud9 is free for developers targeting software development on AWS.

AWS Lambda has matured to become a fully-fledged microservices platform. Developers can now allocate 3,008MB of memory to Lambda functions. Previously, the maximum amount of memory available was only 1,536MB. AWS Serverless Application Repository is a marketplace of serverless applications published by individual developers, companies, and AWS partners. These applications are packaged as Serverless Application Model (SAM) templates that support the one-click deployment of applications. The marketplace approach will encourage the serverless community to share best practices and reusable functions. Developers can adjust the concurrency limit on each function to ensure that the number of calls to downstream services is within the specified limits.

Functions deployed in AWS Lambda can be stored and versioned in source code control repositories like AWS CodeCommit and Github. Multiple versions can be simultaneously implemented with support for Blue/Green deployments. Developers can configure incoming traffic between two AWS Lambda function versions based on pre-assigned weights. This feature can be used to gradually shift traffic between two versions, helping developers to perform a rolling upgrade of serverless applications.